The antidote to ideologies

THE SATURDAY ESSAY: what the referendum taught us about beastly barbarians & the bollocks of belief

This is something I wrote a few days back in reply to an online acquaintance:

‘For the first time in my life, I am genuinely worried about the levels of vitriolic, assumptive fanaticism in my home country. I look at some of the utterances of the Left, and I don’t recognise anything of my nationality in them.

I look upon Hunt, May, Cameron and Osborne and wonder what on earth these depraved hobgoblins are doing in positions of power.

Two sets of idiots wedded to two ideologies so obviously flawed, and yet so terrifyingly similar in their desire for total control. There seems no longer to be a sense of proportion, discernment or even reason to it all.

I have met older Germans in the past who described the period 1926-36 in their country in the same way. As a historian, I find this preference for the systemic over the human horribly familiar. As a species, we are further than ever from having the faintest idea what we are about. I don’t see this as a good point in our existence to be heading into probably the biggest econo-fiscal reset in human history.

Probably, the only way to deal with it all now is via laughter…..and to hell with pc and neurotically oversensitive young people cosseted in self-pity for far too long. For the sixth time in a millenium, unachievable Utopia is hard at work, creating Dystopia.’

OK, I did have toothache at the time; but having had the offending molar extracted (that makes 16 in three years) I hold the key observations in my heart still:

I don’t recognise anything of my nationality in them. I’d spent the day before looking across Left Remaindeer sites. It wasn’t the obscenity of the language that shocked me, but the memememe screaming, winding each other up, Lord of the Flies feeling of infants who’d never been taught the civics of liberal democracy. Curiously, I had the same feeling watching gladioli being thrown onto Princess Diana’s funeral cortège: it was counterfeit, not British, and based on emotional incontinence.

Who are these people, and how have they reached maturity with such ill-based certainties? Braindead educational values sprung to mind – but I sensed there must be more to it than that.

wonder what on earth these depraved hobgoblins are doing in positions of power. The one thing I agree 100% with the liberal-Left about is the uniformity of criminal mentalities now at work in the Conservative Party élite. Everyone Cameron has promoted – and almost all his friends – are spivs with clouds in their past, serial liars, and too easily corruptible. They aspire to the magnetically confused moral compass of Blair, Campbell, Mandelson and Brown.

It’s not that they were never socialised, it’s that they consciously chose to reject it.

seems no longer to be a sense of proportion, discernment or even reason to it all. The referendum ‘lies’ issue is the best example of what drove me to make this observation. A huge number of Remain campaigners were still this week referring only to ‘Leave campaign’ lies, when – as a Brexit supporter myself – I was perfectly able to recognise that there had been hyperbole and untruth on both sides. The Left Remaindeers, however, wouldn’t have it. As a tweeter, presenting each mindless assertion with examples of Remain scare-mongering was like shooting ducks in a barrel: how could anyone with normal levels of self-respect keep walking onto rakes like that? (Chuku Umuna – where is your common sense?)

The ‘Nigel Farage was responsible for Jo Cox’s death’ leap – and it was a leap far greater than anything Evil Knievel ever envisaged – was used cynically by the Right….but literally by the Left. This too baffled me – as did the Guardian cartoons of that period: they were like something out of Der Stürmer in 1931. The next day, two separate UKIP canvassers (without collusion) told me they had been threateningly abused, one of them recording the words “murderers….you should be hanged”. I wonder now if these went into Mr Plod’s notebook as “evidence of abuse on the increase”.

Finally – and for me, most sadly – two very old left-wing friends asked me to “stay away from” them for a few months, as ‘at the moment we feel antagonism towards everyone who voted Leave’ and – get this – ‘while some good people voted to leave, all the bad people voted to Leave’. Between them, this couple have an aggregate IQ at around 290; but they were able – albeit perhaps temporarily – to include Blair, Mandelson, Cameron, Osborne, Hunt, Crabb and Harman as ‘good’.

After 1938 in Germany, a great many former neutrals in the German intelligentsia, media and military exhibited the same sort of curious ability to be “taken over” by persistently repeated propaganda. Everyone, it seems, is prone to mobthink.

this preference for the systemic over the human is horribly familiar. I have many friends (and less frequent visitors to The Slog) who seem confused as to my “position”. This is because I will at one moment lay into Hilary Benn, and the next condemn Boris Johnson. There is no confusion here: they are both arseholes.

My position couldn’t be simpler to explain: I am interested in citizen individuals and their pro-social fulfilment, not systemic ideologies. I believe philosophy opens the mind, and ideology and religion tend to close it. I’m a utilitarian mutualist inspired by (but not slavishly devoted to) Jeremy Bentham.

Neoliberalism and socialism are rigid and flawed systemic ideologies under which, in the vast majority of cases, the majority suffers and a greedy élite thrives. As the old Soviet joke had it, “Under capitalism man exploits man….and under socialism, it’s the other way round”.

People-based politics recognise the need to regulate the élite. Systemic politics aim to shut up the masses.

we are further than ever from having the faintest idea what we are about. People-based social philosophy is empirical; it aims to use new knowledge in neuroscience, behaviourism, social anthropology, genetics, autonomic wiring and many other relevant disciplines to understand people, and how they can best be served and fulfilled.

Contemporary politicians are almost completely ignorant about all these disciplines: they’re far more interested in how they can get bigger helpings and fill their pockets.

Harriet Harman’s feminist narrative is outdated, and at times absent, science. The Tory attachment to prisons directly contradicts every field-tested theory of alienation, redemption, reform and social cost. Multiculturalism is accepted without debate by over 90% of legislators, and condemned by both history and social studies. Both the electoral system we use and the donation model of Party politics are conclusively obvious barriers to The Social Good and direct democracy using an informed electorate. Exactly the same applies to the deregulation of media ownership and education.

This is amateurism applied to a rapidly changing British society – and if it continues, Britain will indeed be a 3rd World country within twenty years. Frankly, in such a context the effect of Brexit is that of a baby shark piddling in the Pacific.

unachievable Utopia is hard at work, creating Dystopia.

I apologise for repeating a frequent mantra here, but until those who aspire to rule over us (and overrule us) grasp it, we will get nowhere: the raw material being proposed for the achievement of their mad ideological objectives is Homo sapiens, not Mr Spock.

Ideologies tend to have one thing in common: their authors are all dead. Their inanimate rules and systems have little or nothing to offer a contemporary, and rapidly changing, world. Marxist dialectics, Friedmanite monetarism, Mohammedan misogyny, Levitt’s globalism, Kenyesian stimulation and Old Labour economic models are irrelevant bunk.

Philosophy too consists of dead thinkers on the whole: but their ideas are timeless because they start from observations about people. Bentham was wrong in his definition of happiness, but his majority focus was right. Hobbes was wrong about ineradicable brutishness, but he was right about the need to regulate misbehaviour. Plato’s theory of shapes was wrong, but his emphasis on an informed electorate being central to democracy was spot-on. And John Locke was totally wrong about human ‘nature’ (not nurture) driving everything, but his distinction between self and other-regarding social actions is a truism far too often ignored by 21st century nannies and the politically ‘correct’.

Let’s take that cliché ‘politically correct’. It’s not simply oxymoronic, it’s intrinsically fascist. It says, “We know what settled science is, and there is no alternative to our version”. The whole point of politics should be to compare and choose between observed philosophy helped by the human sciences. There is no such thing as ‘correct’ unless you seek sanctuary in the lunatic asylums of Pol Pot, Josef Stalin and contemporary North Korea.

PC is the formation of asserted wishful thinking into a bible of blind faith and draconian censorship.

If your thinking is as narrow and insistent as liberal-Left socialist political correctness, then you will find it very hard to live up to liberal multi-philosophy democracy.

And equally, if all you care about is money, globalist power and economic colonialism, then you will increasingly see entrepreneurial liberal democracy as ‘in the way’.

I think both these censorious outlooks have achieved dominance in the West; but in few places more so than Britain. I think too that all of it was there for any discerning observer to see clearly and daily during the EU Referendum campaign.

A particularly compelling demonstration of totalitarian thought is the pc tribe described above awarding itself ‘Progressives’ as a collective noun, and using ‘progressive politics’ as a reference solely to its own assertive, unsubstantiated and often thoroughly disproven tenets. The obvious imputation is that the rest of use are reactionary dinosaurs. Or, to use the hate-free British Left syntax, scum, bigots, morons, fascists, and repellent Little Englander racist xenophobes.

And again in the Brexit aftermath of contrived excuses for a rerun, I was especially brought up with a jolt by the sleazy secret networking of Saint Richard Branson, and his attempts to persuade the UK political class to keep on having EU referendums until the right answer was achieved.

But here’s the truly disturbing bit for me as a man who once saw enormous good in the Labour Party: while even the Tory leadership candidates gave Branson the bum’s rush publicly, I didn’t see a single condemnation of his grubby lobbying from the Left Remains. It leaves one wondering just how long today’s Labour Party spoon is when it comes to supping with the Devil.

It doesn’t do to get overly pessimistic about our species. I am prone to this, but usually pulled back from brink by remembering that, as the now largely retired blogger Old Holborn was fond of saying, “There are 67 million of us and only 8,000 of them”.

Nevertheless, recent events suggest that OH was being optimistic about the numbers consciously or unconsciously at work on the destruction of free speech. The problem is that the 8,000 psychotics seem to have an inordinate ability to get the fanatics working hard for them, and the passives to go quietly along with it.

Bronowski posited that Man is ascending…..that is, evolving in a way that will improve the world. I reached the stage years ago of thinking that dear old Jake was flying a kite: I do not see any evidence at all to support his proposition. Quite the opposite: I see all sorts of evidence to suggest that our big brains were a mistaken by-product – rather than the point of – the arrival of Homo sapiens. Further still, it is becoming clear that aimless medical advance and ubiquitous travel to everywhere on the planet are turning us into an evolutionary dead end….at least, in any natural sense.

Communications technology and non-civic educational values are what is driving humanity today, not evolution. The death-throes of modern Western imperial civilisation are leading inevitably to the rise of the Barbarians….almost exactly as they did in the ancient world. Stephen Fry a few years back complained of “barbarians at the gate”. I have to opine that they stormed the gates long ago: today, they’re in the Forum…..and choosing who’s going to be top of the bill at the Colisseum.

It’s a contentious conclusion, but I proffer it anyway because I think the evidence is strongly supportive of it. What the recent ‘Britain and the European Union’ debate showed was just how easy it is for narrow ideologists to wind up working for the psychos without even realising it. It is the beeleeever’s very blinkered eyes that make him or her the perfect carthorse….obliviously heading down the road to the glue factory, while unable to see the alternative options for grazing in the surrounding fields.

You seem to be operating at a level of reasoning that doesn’t suit you; spitting bile and misunderstanding/misrepresenting the arguments of others may appear to you to be an acceptable way to articulate your grievances, but in truth it only makes you look foolish.

‘Being socialised’ is a very subjective thing, Mr Ward. What the working class consider to be ‘being socialised’ may not be what the middle class think it to be.

Statistically, the working class are working class because their parents worked on the front line rather than behind the scenes. They see ‘being socialised’ as being brought to accept a certain norm in the front-line rough and tumble.

In the middle class, ‘being socialised’ is more a matter of form and restraint, subtlety and the like. It’s very obvious if you read football blogs where people identify themselves as ‘working class’ and you realise that their views of what is ‘normal and acceptable’ are very different to yours brought up in the middle classes.

in the working class, ‘you’ll do this because I your father tells you you will’ is seen as ‘being socialised. In the middle class, that is close to emotional abuses. In the middle class, if you can’t convince your child that doing something is the right course of action, you have lost your authority as a parent and rightly so. You can only impose through coercion, not consent. Not quite the right way of doing things, is it? What’s so unique about sex that requires consent, after all??

You still carry far more of your working class background than you realise, despite your success in life. it’s not for you to pass judgement on what growing up in the Middle Class is like (although ‘having opinions’ means that you do regularly, of course).

The difficulty of course comes when the working class mentality meets the middle class one at school and the teachers are too useless to ensure that both sides learn the values of the other.

I’ve seen ‘working class made good’ bosses and their views on rights in the place of work are brutal, outrageous and utterly incompatible with leadership in my view. It’s because all the aggression of the working class was married to the power of the Chairman, the CEO etc. They simply don’t understand that putting middle class adults with tertiary degrees on electronic surveillance for business purposes should see them in prison. They just see it in terms of ‘showing who is boss’. It’s laughable and pathetic. But it happens. A lot. Nobody goes to University to be put in the prison of electronic surveillance. They don’t and it’s obvious why not. But the psychopaths of the working class just see it as a power game.

As it happens, my mother was upper middle class and my father working class. We were poor when I was very young, because everyone in Britain was poor in the early 1950s. I would be a liar if I portrayed my background as working class: my paternal grandparents lived in a Salford terrace, but hard times had put them there: although Irish, they had both been born into large but comfortable families.
I doubt very much indeed if psychopathy has anything to do with class, although I would agree that many years ago middle and working class values were hugely different. Today I think they are even more removed from each other, but then the working class in any meaningful sense no longer exists. Parenting as a skill has been buggered by bourgeois feminism and feckless underclass fathers. Bourgeois parents throw money at the problem, and sous-classe ‘partners’ refuse to recognise the problem.
My father made good largely because of the Yeoman class respectability values his parents gave him. These are now spat upon by the political Left and Right. I became (for a while) an élite member because my parents and a Grammar School education equipped me with the expectation that I would. Just in time, I realised the dangers of bubble life and got out.
People often try to psychoanalyse me, citing second child, northern roots, and fascist tendencies. Most of it is ill-informed bollocks. Yes, I have a need to impart learning and yes, much of it is ego-driven. But these days, my main concern is to be respected for who I am, not what money and position can bring. No offence, but your cod diagnosis is miles out.

There can never be a Utopia.That’s just the way this world is. Waves one way, then the other.
There is just enough bad, greedy and energetic people to capitalise on a Utopian condition, and just steal a little more for themselves and a little more later. Before you know it, the see-saw starts tipping again.It can’t be stopped; merely slowed.
So, eternal vigilance is the price we pay.
‘We never had it so good’ in the late 50’s til late 60’s -especially in the USA, was the transient top for most cultures.

We are now heading for an ugly bottom -and we are nowhere near that point. We are barely 20% down that road I fear.
Brainwashed children, * world hunger, population explosions, desperate economic migrants, corporate greed, fascist financial crime. You expect mere politicians to resist?
* you think Koran-parotting children in the mosques are indoctrinated any more the primary school kids in the West?

All you (one) can do is your level best in the tiny area of influence you /one live in.
Don’t expect to stop this, even if the masses eventually wake up, how will they behave themselves with their new power?
History tells us they (we) will behave abominably.

Jimmy
Yes, I have a talent to amuse, and I thank you for recognising the skill.
I especially like your word ‘hypocracy’; very inventive and perhaps describing the hyperbole of oligarchies. It would be nice to leave you in here and thus amuse the regulars with your illiteracy, but rules are rules – and we do not accept trolls.
Farewell.

The joy of robust argument has been denied in schools and other establishments for so long and has contributed to a lack of character in our society. There is a malign tendency to always seek the ‘win win’ and other assorted bollocks promoted in the workplace by ‘management training gurus’ to maintain a pliant, unstroppy middle management layer. Tony Blair’s administration bolstered this bullshit with over 3000 new laws and armies of under-strappers, compliance officers, gauleiters and other assorted arseholes.

The bloody nose the proletariat gave the ‘establishment’ in the referendum rekindles hope that the stiff-necked Brit who bristles against officious bullshit artists is alive and well and still capable of kicking like a bloody mule.

Pushed the whole concept of democracy away, ignoring the majority decision pushes the jury away, that lack of a jury is what we based all law upon, all pushed away… leaves you with one thing left a continual fight with no peace because democracy is not around to arbitrate or moderate.

I am so speechless that BREMAIN intend to push all that away because it is not what they wanted implies they do not want peace neither … but hey the left suck up to Soros funding who reckons one of the best years of his life was at 14 under the Nazis, funny that they accept a shilling from those they say they despise.

If the EU superstate now was prepared to make it a fully functioning democracy I would have voted BREMAIN recognising that democracy actually could then reform the EU. The Germans especially would never allow it the EU is their constitution and since the referendum Merkel has already quoted “that she would have to run it by the Bundestag on at least one occasion” what happened to everybody else? Then on top of that the tyrant Junker, not elected only appointed, foaming at the mouth with the only consolation he is not the real mckoy yet of an “Erdogan the kurd killer”.

Our politicians have been lieing and deceiving though, pretending the EU was sovereign and they could do nothing on many of the issues. They could and they can, but it meant putting the UK population first and they have been well and truly found out of putting them last… kind of sums up so many things wrong with parliament. Not changing anytime soon neither they are all bribed and corrupted … guess what they will elect again, yep more bribed and corrupted politicians.

The only judgement on the EU should be on the above principle, if not I only ask why should I accept less democracy than the sh%t one I have now? Go to hell … change it and you have my vote, no negotiation there is no democracy and as for rule of law the USA is finding out on that right now there isn’t any.

Democracy and make it accountable so we can’t have the gang of thieves we have now. They will not go quietly though and if anything they shout for less democracy.

The Left & Right need to recognise this because they are the pawns in the game but both sides are as dumb as a box of rocks not seeing it.

e.g. Police officers shot and Black Live Matter, guess what? Don’t care because that way I have not fallen into the elites trap to bias me one way or the other. Now I can apply democracy = justice to make a proper judgement, corruption and lawlessness filters down and you got to clean the top up before you get the good stuff lower down. You won’t get trickle down wealth though that is rocking horse sh%t.

@ rtj1211 So the working class are blunt knuckle draggers, whilst the middle class have a more circuitous approach and feel their patrician status absolves them from the requirements of their employer. There that saved some space.

Blair, Brown, Harmon, Balls, Cooper, Hodges,Vaz, Mandelson, Jowell, Millibands, Benn, Straw etc were the reason working people like me stopped voting labour and gravitated to non voters or Ukip.
Jeremy Corbyn represented the opportunity to get the afore mentioned to realise they had had their day. I and many others joined the party we supported to ensure Corbyn became leader.
The people of failure still do not see their errors and cling to their belief they are right and everyone else is wrong. Getting rid of Corbyn will not allow them to get back in power. The tories will win again if they don’t self destruct.
Corbyn may not be the most charismatic leader but he does represent the majority of members.
Let the failures break away and see where they end up.
Time for old and young labour to regroup and face the future.

Great essay Mr Ward.
You might like a book by Jean-François Mattéi, a philosophy professor who died in 2014.
‘La barberie intérieure’. ( The barbary inside.)
It was published by PUF in 1999, .
It expands on many of the points you raise.

It begins with a quotation:. ” How is it that we are still and always barbarians”? from Schiller’s.Letters on Man’s Esthetic Education.
I had a visit from a German woman who was born in 1938. I said ‘ It must have been horrendous growing up in the aftermath of WW2″. I was thinking of stories about Berlin. “. Not at all”, she replied. “Hambourg was under the British.”
I came across the same thing when looking into the story of the German troops. Eiserhower left to perish in open air camps in 1945/6. A survivor said. “Once the British took over things became normal.”
That dispassionate British balance and reasonableness.. so carelessly lost in the great takeover by Disneyland Inc
Me. Me. Me..
Still history seems to have a lesson that every century has it birth crisis. Waterloo 1815. Battle of La Somme.1916.
Ours would seem to be just round the corner.

Thank you John. This essay absolutely nailed my thinking of the recent weeks. I have found the vitriol of the Remain narrative, outside of the establishment usual suspects, incredibly disturbing and relevatory. I was not previously completely aware of the size of the proportion of our population who appear to completely lack discernment, critical reasoning and the ability to analyse things for themselves. It is truly depressing and frightening.

People en mass appear to have delegated their personal responsibility to think for themselves to an establishment with a proven track record of misleading and getting it woefully wrong. It’s utterly bizarre to behold. Work colleagues and friends on social media just regurgitating Guardian news article after news article and completely indoctrinated into this narrow alternate reality way of viewing life and society.

It leads me wondering why am I so different, what went wrong (or right) along the way? I’m only 33 and yet (spare a tiny few I could count on one hand) feel most of my generation and certainly what I have seen of anyone younger are living in an alternate universe. I don’t understand how they are so blind to what has been going on around them and what is coming down the road. It’s going to be a very distressing time for them all when the reality finally catches up with events.

The worst part for me, personally, is I’m going through a definitive phase of beginning to not care about the rest of them any more. That I can’t help people who refuse to think of themselves. And there’s too many of them to get to anyway. It concerns me about myself, that I’m currently going through a definite feeling of indifference towards future wellbeing of the ignorant masses as they somnambulant towards the coming…. changes.

That is my current challenge – to fight to maintain compassion and brotherly love for those who cannot see.

@ Apol –
Speaking of generational changes, just watched a doc. on the Prohibition era in America, coinciding with the Flappers heyday and everyone suddenly throwing off all the constraints from their strait-laced pasts, especially women, who until then were considered immoral or worse if seen drinking in public. Society was divided into the “wets” and “dries”. Far from alcohol being unavailable, thanks to Capone and assorted gangsters with their speakeasies, dives, joints and underground clubs – in New York alone there were over 100,000 – it didn’t deter many wanting to get it and led to a huge growth in crime and overt gang warfare. A familiar tale of unintended consequences……. But all this jollity came to an end following the 1929 Wall St Crash and Great Depression, when factors such as the loss to the government of tax revenue caused the new President (Roosevelt) to partially repeal the law, though still restricting beer and wine to an alcoholic content of some 3%!!

Looking at western societies’ current addictions, crazes and preoccupations, one wonders how they will manage to deal with the repercussions of the apparently imminent next Crash…….

JW I found your essay extremely sober and disquieting. I was unable to disagree with any of it.
I find the times I now live in most difficult to feel optimistic about.
During the extensive coverage of Brexit on tele’, was a young lady crying bitterly about her life being utterly ruined by the OUT result.
I was astounded by such a response and from those who poured their vindictive hate at those who dared vote for freedom,
the consensus of voters.
At risk of servile flattery, I have to say that I don’t see you as being overly pessimistic about our species, rather as one making statements of fact. Please keep up the good work.

I would like to relay something that happened at Glastonbury Festival which was a sea of remain. The day after the result of the referendum I was given a ‘Scarborough’ warning by my wife and daughter to keep my gob shut, which I did with great difficulty. The contempt and indignation poured on those who voted to leave was quite unbelievable.

What gave me a ray of hope was something that had happened early on the Friday morning. I awoke convinced that remain would have won the day by a few percentage points. I thought the ‘fix’ was in. I looked in shock as I tried to take everything in on my iPhone.

Then something quite wonderful happened. There was a young couple in the tent next to us who would be I say late twenties with two children around 5-6, and they were talking to the them about the referendum result. The Mum was explaining to her daughter that the UK had had a result that was very close, but the people who wanted to leave had won by a small amount. As God is my witness the young girl said to her Mum…..”does that mean we’re free”…..her Mum replied……. “Yes”.

Good Stuff. My late 40s sibling found herself on the wrong side of many of her 40/50-summat online friends when she came out for “Leave”. It got very nasty. I find it incredible that people of such maturity of years can be so ragingly infantile over the matter. You’d think having been around and potentially sentient pre-97-or-so they’d have at least a bit of mental innoculation against the Cultural Revolution. I wonder if I had been born 20 years later just how I’d have weathered ‘graduating’ through a culture that has incorporated all the imperatives and premises of the Cultural Left. It was bewildering enough to work out what was what for a dope like me back in the day, but what with the way things have gone since then….I’d have had to be a lot more strong minded and potentially even more socially isolated.

Jimmy, don’t you understand JW and his crew want people who agree who will not challenge.
Its my ball and if you are not going to play to my rules then I will take my ball away. Well JW and the slog, SOD OFF WITH YOUR BALL.
Nothing worse than suppression of freedom of speech.
Nothing more sickening than everyone agreeing what a wonderful chap JW is and what a wonderful insight he has, contributing to British life and values…….living in SW France, a dead zone beyond dead, so wonderful it reminds me of vomit.
JW your lovely photo would fit well on some of the mausoleums we have here in Italy.

For 40 years Westminster has been the stooge of this EU. Every now and again we had some pictures broadcast of the various Prime Ministers signing some treaty. A treaty! It must be important, as folks cooked their dinner with the broadcast in the background. Only now have folks on a big scale realised. Its why Westminster never does anything it says it will and does things nobody asked for, its why the polticians, far from being charismatic, powerful, leader class type people, they are advert guys, public relations,spokesman.

When we voted to leave the EU , we also voted to get rid of the contents of Westminster, its just that many of us havent realised yet and Westminster/EU is busy taking advantage of that shrinking factoid, by re-arranging the furniture.

Yorkie Mark,
Hilarious :-)
An old neighbour of my parents came to visit a few days back, bless her ( a devote member of the 1960s middle class). We had a lovely chat but then for some reason the referendum came up. I was a bit surprised as she was most upset, almost beside herself. She told me that she had listened to the politicians but decided that they were not to be trusted ( wise choice) but said she had focused on what the economists had to say and in her opinion these were the people to trust (why?) i almost peeded my pants laughing! She was devastated by Nigels speech, I tried my best to calm her but she was out of the door in a second flat:-). The best part was my neighbour Brian (who I call Brain on account of his lack of them) Now Brain is true working class and i mean working and always has been. In that respect Brain is someone to be respected. Anyhow in a bit of banter we got onto the subject, now both I and Brain voted out but what was most interesting was how his extended family (and i do mean extended as there seems to be thousands of them) thought. So Brain told me how his great grandchildren had voted at school, he told me that although they were only 10 this put them in the ideal age bracket to understand our politicians. The school had gone to great efforts to replicate the referendum and the results were a stunner ………… Almost 100 percent out………. God bless those little shits :-) I havnt laughed so hard in years.

The remain vote is not a single purpose shared by all who voted IN. Wee Burnie (Sturgeon) has but one aim an Independent Scotland and the brexit vote blocked any hope of achieving this without becoming independent first. This also put the Pound sterling idea out of court. She still has not answered the fundamental question – why leave a union of nations in which Scotland receives a fair and adequate representation in the name of independence and then throw that away to join a union which is undemocratic and in which you are but a small cog and which will insist on the euro as currency.
Northern Ireland voted IN hoping that this would be the outcome of the referendum as that put paid to any question of the unification of Ireland. This has now surfaced and will be a long drawn out affair. When partition took place the Catholic population in N.I.was some 25% it is now over 49% and in the majority.
Lastly London – this is the core support and beneficiaries of the EU – isolated and almost insular – the London population has failed to recognise the role of a national capital and has become a region of the EU – regionalisation was tried and got thrown out as that was the final strategy for the destruction of the sovereign state.
So we have three ferrets in the sack with differing objectives and not with a common purpose.
I want to touch on another issue which concerns Stephen Crabb the failed candidate for the premiership of this nation. In his sextext he states that MPs are not perfect etc etc. well there’s a surprise. I think at various times in the past few decades we have got to the point that we can’t be shocked by the greed. lack of both moral discipline and personal integrity which those who seek high office in our nation exhibit. For Mr Cameron to dismiss this latest Crabb issue as a ‘private matter’ from a man seeking such an office exhibits a serious lack of judgement on his part but in keeping with some of the most disastrous appointments made by a Conservarive PM for a long time

You’re like a caricature of what many people are really starting to resent, perhaps you do it on purpose for shits and giggles? Perhaps you are serious? Either way, hilarity for all the wrong reasons is your reward.

I asked a family member- a confirmed remainer, how they would feel if the result of the referendum had gone the other way, with the same percentage results in reverse. How they would feel about marches to protest the result and all the many other manipulations to deny a democratic vote. Needless to say they could not answer.

I think the problem with all isms, neoliberalisn, socialism, islamism, catholicism etc is their belief in the perfectability of human nature. That is, if we would only get with the programme ie do what we are told all will be well and if not we must be insane or criminal. I am with Arthur Schopenhauer on this in that I think what we are is what we get and we cannot be perfected in one lifetime. A programme of selective breeding or eugenics might improve the human race but the problems with that don’t need rehearsing here.

At base we are all aggressive, teritoriall, predetory apes very closely related to our chimp relatives who are all of the proceeding and more as they exhibit most of our vices. So the problem remains what to do with us. I think it is self evident that we are most comfortable living in tribes of our own folk, where because we are related by blood we can predict others behaviour. The Nation State seems to be the largest unit that can accommodate us comfortably and although a Nation State can accommodate a few closely related tribes it fails when it tries to accommodate all the tribes of the world.

The historian Mary Beard recently wrote movingly about a Roman Emperor of the third century who granted all the peoples living under the Imperial Yoke the right to become Roman citizens. She cited this as a wonderful example of diversity at the height of the Empire. What she did not say was that within about two hundred years it had collapsed and theWestern Empire was no more.

BTW apologies for spelling and grammatical mistakes. I recognize John’s North and also went to a grammar school even though the offspring of mere mechanicals. Also my ancient keyboard sticks probably as a result of having so much wine sprayed upon it when I read the likes of Jimmy and even rtc.

I agree with your pessimism John only a starry eyed optimist like Obama could have the following quote woven into the Oval office rug. “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice”……….yeah right.

When I read comments from the likes of “Angela” and ” Gary Jones” et al above and elsewhere, I am gripped by the same feeling as when I see a particularly loathsome looking specimen on one of Mr. Attenborough’s programmes. I know it’s not the poor animal’s fault – they are what they are, they’ve evolved that way and they are probably as happy with their lot as any other, but I still rather they’d stay in their own habitat until they’ve evolved a little more before introducing themselves to polite company. I am a very imperfect human being with much work to do, it would seem …

I thought rtj1211’s contribution was a good one, albeit uncomfortable reading for people of a certain background. But if the EU is an example of good middle-class folk working together, why did Cameron get such short shrift in his polite “negotiations”? Contrast that with the instant accommodation made to Erdogan and his more robust approach of ‘nice continent you’ve got there, shame if anything happened to it’, a playbook which is now being studied by others on the African continent. If one thing pushed me off the fence to go with ‘Leave’, despite the economic uncertainty that might be unleashed, it was the EU’s refusal to offer our PM anything substantive to offer his electorate, only to then crumble when threatened with the threat of force and disorder from a party that is not even part of the EU. Very nice cartoon at the top as well.